Making Memories at Fort St. Joseph

Wetscreening!

Hello everyone, I’m Kaylee Hagemann. I am a senior at Western Michigan University, I’m majoring in Anthropology and double minoring in Comparative Religions and Public History. This is my third year participating in the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project. I was in the life-long learners summer camp in 2015, I was a field school student in 2017, and this year I am the Lab Coordinator for the 2018 Field Season.

After a year of being away from the field, I was surprised to see how easy it was for me to fall back into the same field school routine since we have a new group of students. I was used to the group of students I was part of last year, so I thought it would take a while to get used to all the new faces. But it has been surprisingly easy. The students of this field school are engaged and so full of energy. They are a joy to work with!

As Lab Coordinator, my job mainly entails keeping track of the artifacts and helping the students in the field and in lab. During the day while we are in the field, I assist the students with their units and at the wet screening station. I go from unit to unit, helping the students excavate and answer any questions they may have. While the students are digging in their units, they dump all their soil that they remove into buckets and is saved to go through the wet screen. They take their buckets to the wet screens and dump their soil through screens with 1/8” mesh. They then use water from hoses to help push the soil through the screen to reveal any artifacts they may have missed while hand excavating. So far, students have found unburned animal bones, calcined animal bones, seed beads, wampum beads, lead shot, and more in their wet screens.

After working in the field, the students do lab work. All the artifacts recovered in the field are taken to the Stables to be washed and sorted. The students must remove dirt from the artifacts before they are sorted. They use water, tooth brushes, and dental picks to clean the artifacts. Once the artifacts are completely dry, they can be sorted by material and how the artifact was used. For example, we would separate iron nails from unidentifiable iron. This activity helps the students to learn how to identify 18^th-century French colonial material and Native American material. They can use what they learn from the artifacts to get an idea of what life was like at Fort St. Joseph. These artifacts are then put in bags, are given identification tags, and is put in boxes to be ready to be studied, to be cataloged into the artifact inventory, and integrated into the artifact archives at the Fort St. Joseph Museum during the year.

I am very excited for this field school and all the things the students will discover at Fort St. Joseph. All the field work and lab activities can be hard work, but the students will be able to learn so much from it. When they handle the artifacts, they are not just touching an object, they are connecting themselves to the artifact’s memories and to the people who owned these materials. Once the students dig past the alluvium and the plow zone soils, and reach the occupation zone, they will be able to touch a ground that has not been touched in about 250 years. The artifacts they find in the occupation zone were not disturbed, where they lay is exactly where they had been set down all those years ago. I believe it is such a special gift to be able to learn from the memories of the people who lived at Fort St. Joseph and to continue these memories.